Contact: Hannes KRÄMER

Project at the Centre:

Borders/Limits of the future. The European external border as a place and mode of cooperation

The project asks about the future imaginations of external borders of the European Union (EU) at a time in which Europe's borders have become increasingly questionable in the face of profound and plural crises. The EU is reacting to these changes with an increased positioning of itself in relation to what is to come, a search for the “future of Europe”. Conferences are held on this subject, texts are written, statements are published, and legislative initiatives on the future direction of the EU are produced. In these mostly discursive ideas about the future, the European external borders act as a crystallisation point for questions of future community, economic exchange, and the scope of rights. Borders are always imagined and discursively marked as places of cooperation and isolation. The project would like to question the imaginations of the future shape of the external borders in terms of the implicit and explicit cooperation character - i.e. to empirically work out which ideas of future cooperation are in play within these borders.

Research Interests:

• Contemporary Economics, Work and Organizational Sociology, Sociology of Economics
• General Sociology, Social Theory and Social cChange
• Border Research, Mobility
• Contemporary Sociology (especially Future Research)
• Qualitative Social Research (especially Ethnography and Methodology of Empirical Social Research)
• Social and Cultural Theory (particularly Practice Theory, Microsociology, Communication Theory, Poststructuralism and Theories of Everyday Life)